MSPs, Are Your Clients Asking You For Employee “Productivity” Monitoring Recommendations?

In recent years, MSPs have been receiving frequent requests from their clients to help them understand their employees and improve productivity in remote, hybrid, and digital work environments.

We’ve spoken with hundreds of MSPs who feel pressured to source solutions for their clients because they are unaware of alternative options. This problem often translates to using employee monitoring tools, which don't actually address the root problem of productivity.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Employee productivity has become a notable concern ever since COVID-19, and it’s led to clients turning to their MSPs to recommend solutions. However, consistently suggesting employee monitoring tools to solve productivity problems just doesn’t feel right.

At Produce8, we offer work analytics that empower individuals, teams, and organizations to tackle productivity issues with a completely different approach. We’ve designed our product to help you and your clients understand factors that impair productivity while giving individuals complete control over their data.

Understanding Your Clients’ Productivity Needs

Giving your clients what they want and what they need is not always clear, especially when it comes to productivity. While some clients want employee monitoring tools or traditional productivity trackers, others may want more actionable insights their employees can learn from.

Take a look at your current client base. They probably sit in one of these five buckets.

If these client groups look familiar, we can help you re-engage them and offer a solution that sets your MSP apart from competitors. To do this, we must come to understand the challenges they face and address why employee monitoring tools and traditional productivity trackers are not the right solution.

Employee Monitoring Software Is Not Useful for Solving Productivity Issues

At its core, employee monitoring software isn't designed to boost productivity. Its primary aim is often more about oversight than optimization. Sure, it can give managers a bird's-eye view of what employees are up to, but that doesn't automatically translate to a more productive workforce.

As you may have experienced, some clients recognize that employee monitoring leads to fear as a motivator, which is not great for culture or productivity. They also know that employee monitoring doesn't address challenges that high performers face (such as overworking, which can lead to lowered productivity), doesn't create dialogue, and often misinterprets the workday.

Clearly understanding productivity is about far more than tracking what every employee is doing. Many MSPs (like yours) are searching for a tool that balances organizational objectives with employee productivity and well-being.

Achieving this all starts with giving employees the data they need to make informed changes. In other words, we must enable them to understand their workday.

Understanding and Solving the Real Problems

Your clients might want employee monitoring tools—but they might not.

What you need to do is help them determine whether they want to protect their company from time and property theft or if they want to empower their employees and help them understand what is impairing productivity. To do that, we need to understand the source of the real problem.

In the last four years, digital distractions have been on the rise. It's no wonder people are having a hard time focusing on their work.

Then there's collaboration overload . Thanks to all these new communication tools like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, it feels like meetings have taken over our entire calendar.

Oh, and let’s not forget broken workflows. You know, when your employees spend a huge number of their work hours searching for documents and information.

All in all, it seems like everything's a mess. So, it’s not surprising that your clients believe there is a productivity problem. There is. And the first step to solving this problem is understanding how the team works — not with employee monitoring, but with analytics that can be accessed collectively. Then the team can work together to make changes and measure whether they’re effective.

Produce8 Can Help You and Your Clients

MSPs have a golden opportunity to make a difference for their clients by tackling these modern workplace woes head-on. Instead of slapping on another Band-Aid solution like employee monitoring, MSPs can offer work analytics that empower the whole team.

Rather than equipping managers so they can watch what everyone's doing, work analytics dive deep into how teams actually work. It's all about understanding work habits, identifying pain points, coming together to have real discussions, and then making real, effective changes that enable everyone to do their best work.

Choose work analytics. Avoid employee monitoring. It’s just that simple.

Ready to lead your clients and help them finally solve their productivity challenges? Allow us to share our plan to help you re-engage them by providing the data they need and want.

Let’s revisit the different types of clients:

After segmenting your clients and their specific needs, we recommend re-engaging them with the following approach:

1. Reach out to those in the Client 4 group first. They understand that productivity is a big factor in their team’s success and that work analytics can help them immediately.
2. Next, start the conversation with those in the Client 5 group. These are new clients who haven’t made requests yet, but they are primed to have that conversation around analytics.
3. Afterward, reach out to the Client 3 group, and then the Client 2 group. These customers have already purchased employee monitoring tools, and while one is happier than the other about the solution, they are still ready to hear about the alternatives.
4. As for the Client 1 group, there is no rush to re-engage them. However, when the opportunity arises, don’t hesitate to bring up a new solution to help their workers improve their workday with analytics.

How to Introduce Produce8 to Your Clients

As an MSP, engaging with your clients effectively means providing them with tools that empower and enhance their productivity without compromising trust. Produce8 is designed to do exactly that. As a digital work analytics tool, we’re helping employees understand the work experience through personal data insights.

These insights address productivity barriers such as meetings, messaging, email, task switching, and skipping breaks. By tracking improvements, Produce8 tackles major causes of low productivity in knowledge work, enabling clients to streamline workflows, optimize collaboration, and eliminate digital distractions. This approach builds a culture of continuous improvement and learning, shifting the focus from monitoring to meaningful engagement and understanding.

What sets Produce8 apart is its commitment to privacy and transparency. Unlike employee monitoring software, Produce8’s digital analytics software requires everyone to opt in, ensuring they are always aware of the data they share and retain full control over it. Employees only share interactions with work tools that are relevant to what they want to measure, avoiding invasive practices like random screenshots or keystroke tracking. This results in insights that inform better workdays without the feeling of being spied on.

Once the team understands their work patterns, they can make changes that lead to smoother workflows, better collaboration, and fewer distractions. This data-driven approach sparks conversations about the impact of these changes, ensuring positive outcomes for productivity and employee satisfaction.

Partner With Produce8

Produce8 allows everyone to get on the same page and focus on solving the same problems.

The next time your clients come to you with a request to find a monitoring tool to help their team with productivity, you can instead steer them away from products that just don’t work and towards Produce8, a platform dedicated to helping everyone have better workdays without creating a culture of mistrust and fear.

Currently, the biggest productivity challenges involve employees being distracted by the very technology you support for your clients. Improving the employee experience can boost productivity and is rapidly becoming a new and differentiating strategy for virtual chief information officers (vCIOs).

If you truly care about helping your clients conquer the chaos of the modern workplace and unleash their full potential, it's time to join the Produce8 partnership program.

By teaming with Produce8, you're equipping your team to guide your clients on a journey of self-discovery and helping them uncover hidden insights about how they work. You’ll also be well on your way to making strategic changes that drive real results and enable your MSP to create a difference.

So, what are you waiting for? Join the Produce8 partnership program today. Let's start transforming the way we work, one client at a time.